crime in translation
A friend has just read the first Henning Mankell in French. (Faceless Killers in English). I don’t even know the title in French. We can’t compare our impressions of the book because neither of us can read Swedish and I’m not good enough at French to know if the translation is ‘better’ than the English. What does this mean, anyway? Jan loves reading in French despite being English and she felt that the book was more truly ‘foreign’ in another language than one’s own. This may or may not be true but my point is, how can you tell what’s good? What makes it good? To be truthful and exact or brilliantly find a literary analogue?
I enjoy watching Wallander in Swedish with subtitles. It seems to me that both languages have a similar time span of diction: i.e. there is one precise word to convey meaning (after a while you vaguely know what they’re saying). In some other languages, especially French and Italian, there is a highspeed volubility from the actors, translated curtly and baldly, e.g. “Come back tomorrow.” Que? Have layers of subtlety been edited? Is it the way we tell them?
I suppose the answer is that I should have tried harder at school. Isn’t that always the conclusion?
